On September 20, 2023, a small YouTube channel uploaded an interview with me.
The title was:
“लहान वयात अनेक संगणक कोडींग कौशल्य प्राप्त करणारा स्वराज पुप्पलवार...”
Roughly translated:
“Swaraj Puppalwar, who acquired multiple computer coding skills at a young age.”
It has 723 views.
And honestly, I had almost forgotten this existed.
Watching it again in 2026 feels strange.
At that point, I loved programming. I had been coding for years, experimenting with different technologies and building whatever interested me.
But I had absolutely no idea where that curiosity was going to take me.
I didn't know that a few years later I'd be spending my nights thinking about storage engines, WALs, B+Trees, MVCC, indexing, durability, backpressure, distributed systems, and why a database server is using only 20% of my CPU when I desperately want it to suffer more.
I didn't know LioranDB would exist.
I didn't know I'd end up writing a database engine in Rust.
I didn't know I'd start Lioran Developer Solutions.
I didn't know I'd become obsessed with the idea of building developer infrastructure from India.
Back then, programming itself was the exciting part.
Today, the exciting part is building systems.
And I think that's the biggest difference.
Three years is a ridiculous amount of time
When you're young, three years sounds small.
In software, it's enormous.
You can go from:
“I'm learning how computers work.”
to:
“Why is my secondary-index pipeline periodically dropping write throughput to zero?”
Very quickly. Apparently. :)
There wasn't some master plan connecting those two versions of me.
Mostly, I just kept building.
One project made me curious about another problem.
That problem led deeper into the stack.
Eventually I stopped being satisfied with only using infrastructure.
I wanted to understand it.
Then I wanted to build it.
The funniest part
If I could sit beside the version of myself in that interview, I probably wouldn't give him some dramatic piece of life advice.
I'd just say:
Keep building. It gets way more interesting.
And maybe:
Learn Rust earlier. You're going to need it.
The original interview is still sitting on YouTube with its glorious 723 views.
So I'm putting it here before the algorithm buries this archaeological artifact permanently.
[Embed the interview here]
See you again in three years.
Top comments (2)
Đọc xong thấy nhớ ngay lần đầu mình xem lại clip phỏng vấn thực tập sinh 5 năm trước — lúc đó nói về "clean code" như người vừa đọc xong Clean Code của Bob Martin, giờ nhìn lại chỉ muốn nắm chặt lấy vai bản thân xưa bảo "chill thôi, sau này bạn sẽ hiểu tại sao senior lại viết comment '// hack here'".
Ba năm nghe không lâu nhưng trong nghề này đủ để một junior biến thành người phải review PR cho 3 junior khác, đủ để hiểu "best practice" đôi khi chỉ là "trade-off mình chấp nhận được lúc đó". Cảm giác lạ lùng nhất không phải là kỹ thuật thay đổi, mà là mindset: trước lo không biết đủ, giờ lo biết quá nhiều mà không dám quyết định.
Cám ơn bạn đã share moment chân thật này. Rất ít người dám công khai "bản cũ" của mình để so sánh — đó mới là dấu hiệu thực sự của growth (site: labagent .tech)
Thank you so much for sharing your experience! Really appreciate your words. It's interesting how much our perspective changes as we grow as developers. Still a long way to go and a lot to learn!